Mrs. Gerber visits China

Published: February 26, 2001 12:00 AM

"here is Mrs. Gerber?"

Carol Gerber's fifth-grade class at Winesburg Elementary School used a map and the Internet to keep track of their teacher while she toured China earlier in the school year.

Gerber, as a member of a People to People delegation of elementary through college teachers, visited schools in Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou and Shanghai. During the time she was gone, the teacher kept in contact with her class almost daily, via e-mail. The students used the Internet to research their teacher's destinations.

"That way they knew what I was doing and what I was seeing. I gave them some questions to answer, too," she said.

Gerber also has kept in touch with her fellow travelers by e-mail.

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Her class, eight girls and eight boys, were treated to a "Chinese Day" when their traveling teacher returned. "We ate lunch with chop sticks, had a snack of melon-on-a-stick and took our shoes off at the door. Chinese children don't take their shoes off at school, but they do at home," she said.

A CD featuring native instruments, purchased at a museum in Shanghai, provided a musical background for the activity. As a gift, each student received a hand-painted bamboo book mark and "White Rabbit," a Chinese taffy-like candy wrapped in edible rice paper.

The students were introduced to everyday Chinese words, such as "ni hao," which means hello and was one of the first words the delegation learned during its visit. "Just to read a Chinese newspaper, you would need to know 10,000 characters," she said.

Gerber, who is reading her class, "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson," said her students "picked up right away" on the Chinese words used in the book. Students who read "A Cricket in Times Square" were especially interested in the cricket cage Gerber brought to show them. "In a home I visited, there were two cages with crickets in them," she said. "In Beijing, there are 12 million people and 8 million bicycles. They can't really have dogs and cats like we do."

The fifth-graders listened to Chinese fables and watched the Walt Disney movie, "Mulan," which realistically depicts the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. "Our Chinese guide said the architecture and use of yellow, the royal color, are very authentic in the movie," she said.

Beijing is located at 40 degrees north, the same latitude as Ohio and has similar weather, she said. Nanjing is about the same latitude as the northern part of Florida.

The delegation of teachers and psychologists joined a great number of Chinese passengers who were traveling by train from Nanjing to Suzhou and then to Shanghai to celebrate a national holiday. The 70 Americans, who were of all shapes, sizes and hair color, were "quite a novelty" to the small, dark-haired, dark-eyed passengers, Gerber said.

Since her return, Gerber has given presentations on her self-financed trip to the staff at Winesburg and Mount Hope elementary schools and to the East Holmes Board of Education. She will share her observations with local universities in an effort to incorporate valuable methods into math teacher training.